VC03 - Mortal Grace (62 page)

“He could be here as a sexton, or in some service capacity.”

“No, certainly not in any service capacity.” Behind his bifocals, Brother Tom’s eyes were deep blue and bloodshot. “But has he possibly been here as a retreatant? We’re very popular for retreats.”

He led Cardozo into a small, tidy office. A menu of options glowed on the screen of a desk computer. He punched keys and peered at the result. “I’m sorry, I don’t see any Damien Cole on our list of past retreatants. Am I spelling it right?”

Cardozo angled himself to read over Brother Tom’s beefy shoulder. There was no Cole, but at the bottom of the screen he noticed C. Draper—home address, care of B. Ruskay, Queens. “You have a retreatant by the name of Colin Draper?”

“Yes, indeed. Often.”

“Is he here now?”

“Colin cut short his retreat. He left last night after the ten o’clock news.” Brother Tom shook his head. “Retreatants shouldn’t watch TV. They had another zapping at St. Pat’s.”

Cardozo’s heart fell like a dropped stone. “
OutMag
zapped the cathedral again?”

“Yesterday. In memory of Jaycee Wheeler. It was on Channel Five.”

“I missed it. I was watching seven.”

“Five’s a little livelier.”

“Do you know where Mr. Draper went?”

“He said he had to go home.”

“I notice that home is care of B. Ruskay—do you happen to have that address?”

“Certainly.” Brother Tom scrolled down the list of retreatants till he reached the R’s. “That’s 810 Spellman Drive, Russell Gardens. As a matter of fact, Ms. Ruskay picked him up.”

“Bonnie Ruskay? Last night?”

Brother Tom nodded. “That’s right. The reverend.”

Cardozo called the precinct from a pay phone. He told Ellie to put a twenty-four-hour live monitor on Delphillea Huffington’s phone tap. “Damien’s going to be lining up another communion killing.”

“Maybe we’ll stop him this time.”

Cardozo hoped Ellie was right. “Has Bonnie Ruskay showed up yet? Greg lost her last night.”

“Wait a minute, I’ll ask.” There was a silence, and then Ellie came back on the line. “O’Bannon’s watching the rectory. She’s still missing.”

The Ruskays’ two-story colonial home was set back from the wooded lane on a lushly landscaped lot. Lawn sprinklers arced lazily in the evening light. Rhododendron leaves gleamed as though they’d just been waxed.

Cardozo parked in the drive and rang the front doorbell. A uniformed maid opened the door.

“I’d like to speak with Colin Draper, please.”

She admitted him to a hallway smelling of furniture polish. The chairs had gilt legs. The maid glided away and in a moment glided back and asked him to follow her.

In a living room crowded with cut crystal and cut flowers, a white-haired lady in blue rose from a sofa. She walked toward him with the help of a silver-knobbed ebony cane. “Are you a friend of Collie’s? I’ve never met a soul who knows him—aside from my children. He’s their big brother. A self-appointed big brother, perhaps. But they’ve accepted the appointment.” She was silent, and her silence said she had not accepted it.

“I’m a police officer.” Cardozo showed his shield. “Vince Cardozo.”

“Really?” She stared at him, green eyes shining with curiosity. “Is something wrong?”

“I’d like to talk to Mr. Draper. It’s urgent.”

“That sounds a little ominous. He’s not here right now. Would you care to sit down?”

“I don’t mean to trouble you. When are you expecting him?”

“With Collie that’s hard to say. He was never one to file a flight plan.”

Cardozo smiled. “What time did you last speak to him?”

“What
time
? I haven’t spoken to Collie in years.”

“But he lists this address as his home.”

“He lists the chauffeur’s apartment over the garage. He uses the address for his New York benefits. He’s on state assistance. Janitor’s pay doesn’t go far in today’s economy.”

“Is that where he’s living now?”

“I really don’t know. He has a key and he enjoys fiddling with the roses, but I haven’t seen him in ages.”

“Would it be too much trouble if I had a look at that apartment?”

“It would be if you expect me to show it to you. I have trouble with stairs.”

“I could manage by myself.”

She took his hand and suddenly he became her walking stick. She steered him into the pantry. She peered at a pegboard of keys, holding her spectacles in front of her without putting them on, like an artist examining detail work under a magnifying glass. She plucked a key off the board and handed it to him.

“I warn you. It’s bound to be a mess. No one’s been up there for years.”

EIGHTY

V
IOLET SHADOWS SLID ACROSS
the lawn, and above the trees the darkening sky flowed with cawing birds. Cardozo didn’t want to risk Collie’s returning and seeing lights in the apartment. He went back to his car and took the flashlight from the glove compartment. He crossed to the garage.

The sliding door was down, and the key Mrs. Ruskay had given him didn’t fit.

Around the side of the building he found another door with a bush of pink-and-yellow roses blooming next to it.

Hello
,
Linda Porter
, he thought.

The key turned easily in the lock. The door opened with a mousy squeak.

A damp smell pooled just inside. He turned on the flashlight. Motes danced brightly in the beam.

He aimed the light in a slow arc around him. The beam wriggled across gardening tools, hoses, stacked lawn furniture, a tall pile of boxes covered with a tarpaulin.

Just beyond the boxes, a van had been parked close to the garage wall. The beam picked out a New York license plate. His footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. He walked around to the side of the van.

The beam moved across a teardrop-shaped window. It swung over to a smiling sun painted on the driver’s door. Beneath the sun, the beam picked out the words,
GOD LOVES YOU—SO DO I.

The quiet thickened.

He walked back to the stack of boxes. As he touched the edge of the tarpaulin, a faint chemical smell floated up. He lifted the canvas.

A blinding reflected white struck his face. He angled the beam lower. It played across a surface that had the faint dents of pockmarks in snow. His fingertips recognized the brittleness of plastic foam, and he saw that the boxes were jumbo hampers, stacked one inside the other like cups in a giant’s cupboard.

The flashlight caught the shadowed indentations that formed the four letters K A L A. He lifted the canvas and saw M A Z O O.

The beam groped along the floor. A rust-colored stain led from a drain to a doorway. Beyond the open door was a stairway, and beyond the stairs, a second chamber. The flashlight played across enormous twin sinks joined by a ribbed drain board. Old-fashioned washtubs. Rust-colored stains ran down the sides.

He raised the enameled steel lid. Hairs and skin particles had caught on the drains. He turned away quickly and moved up the stairs, one foot after the other on the bare steps, pushing through dead air.

At the top of the flight the elliptical wafer of light spread over rose-patterned paper. His lungs pulled in the thick fumes of incense residue. The beam of light hit a bookshelf.

He opened St. Augustine’s
Confessions.
The flyleaf bore an inscription:
To Damien
—
Love, from Damien.
He opened
City of God
and
Hound of Heaven
,
The Seven-Story Mountain
and
Jesus, Are You with Me?
All had the same inscription:
To Damien
—
Love, from Damien.

The beam reached across gray shag carpet and struck the bottom of a closed door.

He rose and pulled on the door handle. The door was fastened. There was no key in the keyhole, but it was a primitive-looking lock.

He explored. The flashlight found a hallway. A wet glow at eye level jumped out at him. His own face stared at him, reflected in glass.

Behind the pane, fragments of Gothic lettering came together:
Bring me young sinners.
Behind another pane,
Suffer the little children to come unto me.

The beam leapt to the opposite wall.
My kingdom is not of this world.

In the bathroom, another framed Gothic placard:
The kingdom of God is within you.

In the kitchen, two more:
You must become again as a child.

He who dies with forgiveness of sins…wins!

He opened a drawer and searched through kitchen utensils and found a thin, sturdy-looking knife. He returned to the living room and inserted the blade in the crack of the locked door. He worked it up and down and sideways. The lock clicked and the door swung open and he was staring into a closet.

The flashlight began at the top. Boxes and bric-a-brac crowded a narrow shelf.

The beam traveled down to the hanger rod, along overcoats and raincoats and men’s suit jackets. Down to slippers and tennis shoes and galoshes and something else winking through dust.

He stooped and recognized a half-dozen empty Bacardi rum bottles. And something else. A small Minolta camera and the antique piggy bank from Bonnie’s study.

As he lifted the piggy bank, something clunked.

He shook it. There was a rattling in the cash drawer. He frowned and then reached into his pocket and found a penny. He dropped the coin into the slot.

A silvery snatch of “Swanee River” tinkled.

There was a squeak, as though a bat had been impaled on a needle, and the drawer popped open.

He shined the flashlight into it.

Besides his penny, there were four small objects inside. Three of them sparkled, and he saw that they were rings.

One was an ivory cameo. As he held it to the light he could make out a carving of a peacock.

Another had been fashioned out of flip-tops from soda cans and coated with bronze.

The third, too small to fit any finger but a newborn baby’s, was a circle of slightly tarnished gold.

The last object in the drawer was a lock of dark Caucasian hair fastened with a rubber band.

Cardozo took a small plastic evidence bag from his pocket. He lifted the bank and emptied it into the bag.

Now he felt deeper under the galoshes. His hand struck the edge of something rectangular and solid. He pulled out a photograph album.

The first dozen pages were New York sights—the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building. Then came a group of photos of the ceremony at Vanderbilt Garden. One showed two young men dragging a large picnic basket from the bushes. The remaining photographs were flash portraits of young people, each of them asleep or passed out in a wing chair slip-covered in parakeet chintz.

Cardozo stared at their faces, bleached and dumb as driftwood. They touched an aching nerve in his memory. He recognized the dead kids from Father Joe’s talent file.

He turned the page. Three sheets of paper had been tucked between the leaves. He teased them loose. They were stationery with an engraved letterhead:
St. Andrew’s Rectory.

Line after line of block letters had been carefully printed and neatly crossed out. He read through them slowly:

THE DEAD THE MURDERED CHILDREN DEAD TEENAGERS THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE DEAD RUNAWAYS WILL BE FOUND ARE IN THE DESK THE RECTOR’S THE BOX IN THE SHOE BOX

And then, finally, not crossed out:

THE MURDERED RUNAWAYS ARE IN THE SHOE BOX IN THE RECTOR’S DESK.

A sheet of stationery slipped from his hand. As he bent to pick it up, the flashlight beam struck the edge of a chair. A wing chair—slip-covered in parakeet chintz.

He stood there, hearing no sound but his own heartbeat. It was as if the world had dropped away and he had entered a space completely apart.

He played the flashlight beam upward across the closet. It caught the mirrored brightness of a second clothes rod behind the first. He reached through the jackets and touched a fold of linen.

He pulled it into the light and recognized a priest’s white chasuble. Blossoms of dried blood dotted the lace trim. The cloth was stained and smeared like a butcher’s apron where hands had wiped themselves on it.

At the bottom of the closet, in the very rear, cassocks and stoles had been balled into a pile. He crouched down to feel them. The black cloth was caked and crusted.

His ribs pulled violently together. A taste of bile shot into his mouth. He lunged for the bathroom, caromed off a wall, found the toilet and vomited.

He stayed there, braced against the wall, eyes stinging. The spasms passed. He groped for the sink and cupped running cold water into his mouth and spat it clean. He carefully rinsed his face and hands and shook his hands dry.

“Is that you, Collie?” a voice said.

He swung the flashlight.

Father Joe Montgomery stood in the doorway. One eye was covered in gauze. The other was blinking rapidly. “I was sleeping—I heard sounds. Are you all right?”

“It’s not Collie,” Cardozo said.

Father Joe tightened the sash of his robe. He seemed to reach out with all his available senses, listening, sniffing. “Who are you?”

“Vince Cardozo.”

Father Joe pondered for a moment. There was something deeply baffled in his face. “What are you doing in the dark?”

“Looking for you.”

Cardozo phoned Ellie at the precinct. “Have you got a pencil?”

“Right in my hand.”

He gave her the address. “Send the crime-scene crew with a search warrant—and a four-man backup to secure the scene.”

“What have you found?”

“Scene of six homicides.”

Ellie gave a low whistle.

“Has Eff contacted his grandmother yet?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But Reverend Bonnie Ruskay’s flock can breathe easier. She’s back at the rectory.”

EIGHTY-ONE

A
BOVE THE RECTORY, CLOUDS
crowded a sunless sky. Cardozo leaned his full weight on the door buzzer. The cleaning woman opened the door. He pushed past her down the corridor to Bonnie’s office.